


Various original story fragments

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Why write if not to post it on archive of our own, mentions of Star Trek, mentions of dirty streets, mentions of divorce, mentions of illness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 07:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30085437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: I’m taking like a gazillion online writing classes at the moment.  Deep down, you know you want to read my homework.  Furthermore, you want to comment on it.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 6





	1. Alley

**Author’s Note: The assignment was to write about a character struggling to get through a dirty alleyway, first using first person, then again from a distanced third person point of view.**

**FIRST PERSON**

I get sick easily. That’s an objective fact, not something in my head. I got whooping cough during my senior year of high school . I got chickenpox twice, and it doesn’t matter that that’s not supposed to happen. It’s not like I could’ve just conjured spots onto my body, like _poof_ , like with the power of my mind or whatever. I honest to god did get chickenpox twice, and I’ll probably get shingles too, as soon as I’m old enough to get them. 

The shingles are out of my control. Tons of viruses and bacterias have hidden consequences way after they’ve supposedly cleared your system. It’s like, I read online about this guy who dropped dead of polio fifty years after getting it as a child and being totally asymptomatic. Once the polio was in his body, it was in his body. That’s why I need to keep the bugs out of me. Who knows how many I’ve picked up already! Yeah, I can wash my hands and wash my clothes and not breathe too close to anybody, but my big fear is that something evil will worm its way past my defenses, and I’ll never quite get it out.

I’m smart. That’s also an objective fact. I got an A+ on my first biology test last week. If anybody were watching me right now, standing somewhere around 63rd street, they wouldn’t think I was smart. They’d think I was crazy stupid. I’ve got a class at four thirty down at Fordham, but I can’t take the most direct route, because that’s right when the Broadway shows let out and the tourists come cascading onto the street. I found that out the hard way last week! 

Alas, what I’ve got stretched out before me is worse than a crowd of New York City’s unwashed masses. 

(Pro-tip: All masses are unwashed.)

What I’m looking at is even more dire than that day last week when I caught the cafeteria lady sneezing and learned that I’d have to forego my gazillion dollar meal plan. 

‘Cause here’s the thing: I’m a freaking mess. That’s the objectivest fact of all. I’m fucked up, and stretched out before me on this route that I’ve carefully mapped out to avoid people-germs is a whole load of garbage-germs as far as the eye can see. 

In the alleyway, which I must cross lest I flunk out of college in the first month (smartness be damned), stands a putrid oil-slicked puddle, glinting its iridescent evil like it’s winking at me...

And it’s never a good sign when I start thinking in purple prose...

And I swear to god it’s singling me out...

And it’s like that one mud-monster in that episode of Star Trek the one where Tasha Yar died and the mud monster was made of all the evil in the universe and the episode was called Skin Of Evil and it was a stupid episode and I hated it so much almost as much as I hate the slimy feeling gathering on my skin and in the back of my throat where the whooping cough used to live and might still be lying in wait.

(Yikes)

I have this thing I do, where I try to think of things I like to keep myself from freaking out. Looks like Star Trek isn’t going to help me today. I wipe my palms on my jeans, shake my head, and try to get a more objective view of my surroundings. 

The bricks on the high rise buildings are pockmarked, full of invisible contagions. There are bags of garbage, so many of them that there is no room to walk on the sidewalk. I take in a deep breath, like I’m supposed to in times like these, and the garbage smell fills my nostrils and my lungs and I sorta kinda wish for one of those plague doctor masks with the beaks on them, or better yet a hazmat suit. 

I close my eyes. I run my thumb down each of my fingernails, focusing on the smooth feel. I count, from one to ten and back again. I touch my pocket, concentrating on the reassuring shapes of my hand sanitizer and the miniature sanitizing spray I use for my shoes, the one that I like because it’s strawberry scented. I take out the strawberry sanitizer spray. I spritz a little on my shoes. Then, for good measure, I spray some on my neck. It’s a scent thing. It’s not like I think my neck is already contaminated. Probably. Hopefully. 

(Stop it!)

There are lots of facts, many of them objective. Like objectively, I’ve been myself for my entire life. I know how to deal with being me. I’ve pushed through worse alleyways than this one. 

I take a step forward. 

Objectively, the absolute fact is, this alleyway is going to linger in my mind tonight. It’ll keep me awake, and that’ll mess with my immune system.

I take another step. 

There will always be alleyways, objectively speaking. I’ll always get through them in the end. I’m strong. 

A step.

A horrible image enters my mind, as I pass by the puddle that first caught my attention. I see myself kneeling next it and lapping it up like a dog. It’s not what I want to do. In fact, I’d rather die than do that, but it’s one of those horrible possibilities that always seem to follow me, worse than all of the diseases in the world. 

I break into a run. 

I don’t drink from the puddle, I don’t let my feet touch the garbage, I don’t let me feet touch the cracks in the road, and I don’t die. 

I keep running until I’m back on the main street, where shop owners clean the sidewalks, and things are more crowded but also more civilized. I almost puke, but I swallow it back down, thinking that maybe somebody like me will walk by, and be grateful that I (with my latent chicken pox and whooping cough germs) didn’t add to the mess. 

————-

**THIRD PERSON**

Somewhere around 63rd street, Emma stands staring into the mouth of the alleyway, shoulders thrown back and brown eyes saucer-wide, as if she’s about to face a monster. She hardly breathes, but the muscles in her throat work visibly under her skin as she swallows. 

A tall girl, pretty despite a scar on her cheek she’d given herself picking at her skin during her unlikely second childhood bout of chickenpox, Emma doesn’t carry herself like a New Yorker. That’s fair, considering only moved to the city about a month ago, to begin her first semester at Fordham University, Lincoln Center campus. The problem is that she doesn’t carry herself like somebody who would be fully comfortable anywhere. She either moves at a hunched crawl, picking her tense way past sidewalk cracks and bits of debris, or else sprints from one place to another, like if she moves fast enough she can keep everything she’s afraid of from seeping into her skin. 

Emma fears a lot of things, and blames childhood illnesses for most of them. Besides the double whammy of chickenpox, she also got whooping cough during her senior year of high school, even though she’d been vaccinated. Since then, she’s fancied herself a biologist and an expert in germ theory, though according to her psychologist what she actually is is a textbook case of OCD.

Right now, what Emma fears most of all is a specific puddle of water in the alleyway before her. It’s shiny, slicked with oil and probably teaming with illness. It makes her think of scary things — Star Trek monsters, waves of pestilence, freakish scenarios in which she can vividly imagine herself bending over to drink the water. 

Objectivity is what Emma most prides herself in. The way she uses it in her mind, though, “objectivity” is simile for “coping mechanisms”. If she can’t escape being a little crazy, she’s resolved to be high-functioning crazy. 

In her pocket, she carries two different kinds of hand sanitizer, like talismans against evil. The spray kind, from Bath and Body Works, has a cloying strawberry scent, which for Emma serves a similar purpose to the fragrant herbs medieval plague doctors used to place inside their beaked masks to guard against deadly miasma. 

It’s through the careful ritual of spraying a little sanitizer on her neck, where she can smell it, that Emma manages to make it through the alleyway, though not without sprinting the last several steps, and not without making herself nearly vomit from anxiety. 

Even so, Emma’s bolstered by the experience. She’s defeated another alleyway! By the time she gets to the school, only a few minutes late, she guesses that from the lingering strawberry antiseptic smell the professor and her fellow students will think she spent the hour before class loading up on daiquiris. It is what it is.

**Author’s Notes: If you’re wondering why I’m bringing up whooping cough and Star Trek again, please understand that I have a limited amount of things that I know enough information on to write about.**


	2. Wuhan Street Scene

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The assignment was to write about a place where you’ve lived in as much detail as possible, as if it’s the setting for a story.

At 4:30 AM the street across from the Wuhan shipyard fills with old ladies pushing breakfast carts. A bowl of re gan mian, a spicy noodle dish made with dry sesame paste and adorned with chives and fermented soy beans, costs three yuan. Other sellers offer up meat stuffed buns, duo pi, fried gluten dipped in honey, boiled eggs, sugared ears of corn, and hot roasted sweet potatoes. 

Different groups of people arrive in waves. The shipyard workers are first, mostly men and a few women in blue coveralls, some of whom purchase cans of Snow beer to wash down their morning meal. Cigarette smokes fills the air. There’s laughter and talk about the day ahead, much of it in _wuhanhua_ , a dialect of Mandarin in which the _sh_ sounds tends to be dropped and replaced with a _ssss_ sound. As a consequence, speakers of _wuhanhua_ use Chinese standard sign language to clarify their meaning whenever they are discussing the prices of items, because otherwise the words for the number four (si) and the number ten (shi) would be indistinguishable. Even for those who speak standard Mandarin, the use of sign language comes in handy as words are drowned out by the honking of car horns. As a throng of bicycles overwhelms the narrow road and spills out onto the sidewalk, the few cars on the street have no choice but to move at an impatient crawl. 

In this hour or so before the sun starts to rise, the air is clammy with dense humidity. As the horizon turns a hazy pink and gold, the shipyard men disperse, replaced by students on their way to school. Compared to the shipyard workers, the students favor healthy fare, or at least that’s what their parents buy for them. A line stretches out from behind boiled egg lady’s cart. The egg lady has a red face and big hands, and she knows the names of the children who live in the neighborhood. One little boy is puffy eyed and sniffling. When the egg lady asks what’s the matter, his father informs her that the little boy is out of sorts because he stayed up past midnight doing his homework. The egg lady prevails up the boy’s father to forgo the boiled egg and treat him to a salted potato donut at one of the neighboring carts. 

The kids wear school uniforms. They shoulder backpacks adorned with sparkles and cartoon characters and filled with half their weight in course books. Some of the girls wear pigtails with elaborate bows. They don’t speak _wuhanhua_.

At eight A.M. the Chinese national anthem can be heard from the nearby primary school. That’s where the children are supposed to be by this time, though invariably there are one or two stragglers. By now the breakfast sellers are starting to pack up their carts, but not without making a few sales to retired men and women who can sleep late because they don’t have anywhere to go. 

By eight thirty, the breakfast carts are gone as if they were a mirage. Without them, the street is a different place. Due to the Chinese Government’s decision that by the year 2025 all buildings in Wuhan will be at least twelve stories high, many of the buildings around the shipyard are boarded up and set for demolition. The boards are covered in aspirational sayings about protecting ones elders and loving ones country. Some of them boast advertisements for museums and parks that haven’t been built yet. The most common saying is _Wuhan: mei tian bu yiyang_ — “Wuhan: Different Every Day”. Wuhan is a rapidly changing city, and its entire zeitgeist hinges on embracing these changes.


	3. Divorced Couple in a Bookstore

“Cynthia.”

“Hey Alan.” 

He has her cornered by the ground coffee beans. She picks up a bag of fifteen dollar hazelnut whatever and pretends to be reading it. 

“Who goes to a bookstore just to buy coffee?” Alan asks.

Cynthia shrugs.

“And flavored coffee at that. You don’t like that artificial crap,” he reminds her. 

“Things change.” 

“Don’t I know it!” He smiles, but his crazed blue eyes don’t seem to agree with his lips. 

Cynthia passes the bag of coffee back and forth between her hands, shrinking under her ex’s gaze. “Welp,” she says at length. “I’d better be off.” She flashes him a shaky, cornered grin, puts down the coffee bag, and turns to go.

He stops her with a hand on her shoulder. “We need to talk about Daniel.”

“We don’t.”

“I don’t think he’s good for the kids.”

“He’s a good man, Alan.” Cynthia’s shoulders are tense, her voice library-hushed. “He’s done more for them than... well.” She spreads out her hands, choosing not to finish the sentence. “I really do have to go.”

“No, no. Go on. Who has he done more for them for?”

A beat. 

“I was just going to say that he’s done more for them than he had to.” 

Alan purses his lips. He closes his eyes for an instant and takes in a breath, long and slow. 

“Look,” says Cynthia, “I’ll bring the kids by soon, once you get things sorted out with the water company. Anna, especially, misses her daddy.” 

“Why not bring them over tonight?”

“Last time they were over you brought them down to the river to get water to flush the toilet. That’s not normal!”

“It was fine. They thought it was an adventure.”

Cynthia shakes her head. 

“So you’re saying I need to pay money to see my own damn kids?”

“Unless you’re planning on winning the lottery so you can pay their therapy when they’re older, then yes. You need running water. You need to buy a refrigerator instead of teaching them how to leave raw meat on the windowsill in the winter. You need an actual bed instead of a mattress on the floor.” 

“You see, that’s what I meant when I said we have to talk about Daniel. Between the two of you the kids aren’t going to have any idea how regular folk live. They’re going to think life is all... I don’t know!”

“Silver spoons and country clubs?” Cynthia asks dryly. 

“Stupid upscale coffee and turning away from anyone who’s ever struggled a day in his life,” Alan finishes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The assignment was to write a piece that was almost entirely dialogue about a divorced couple meeting in a bookstore.


End file.
